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Welcome to the website of Scotland’s Football Monitor.

The traffic lights are now at red, because we are making an appeal to our community to raise a fairly substantial sum of money to pay not just our hosting costs for the next six months, but to pay for our new premises. The plans we have in the short to medium term are outlined in the “Why We Need to Change” post.We have already had pledges of support (of up to around £20k from people involved in the running of the blog) to pay for equipment and salaries, but we need to have a work environment and communications base which will allow us to work effectively and efficiently to develop and grow our enterprise. The new office and studio will give us a platform to launch all of our content plans over the next year, and take us out of the bedroom/study. We also have volunteers and part-time employees who will collectively man the offices full-time, and having a business base will give us greater credibility and consequently greater access to the people who matter, the people you want to hear from.We are looking to raise around £5,000 by the end of August to enable us to pay rent for the next year, and hosting, telecoms and energy costs for the next six months. We know that the community has responded very well in the past to our appeals. In terms of the sums of money required though, this is whilst relatively modest for a business start-up, of a different order to previous appeals.

At the moment, after six weeks (out of a ten week appeal), we have around 72% of our target. Another few of extraordinarily generous donations have again moved things on spectacularly, and we are deeply indebted to those people who have put their faith in our plans.

Many people have contributed to the cause, but the strength of SFM has always been our community as a whole, and I am now confident that more people will value what we do enough to consider helping out.

The confidence instilled from recent fund raising developments has given us the opportunity to agreeing a deal for secure premises which will give us an effective base of operations.

Of course we still need your help as we have another 28% to go. Monthly donation pledges would give us a great springboard for success. As we have said often enough in the past, if even a half of our regular users donated the current minimum subscription (of £3 per month) we would raise around £10,000 per year. We are looking, initially, to raise only half of that – and remember you can cancel a monthly donation at ANY time.

What we can promise is that every penny you donate will be invested in building and growing the new Sports & Football Monitor

Total to date: £3604

Target: £1396

ADSJust a wee note on the ads by way of update:The ads on the site are still a suck-it-and-see experiment to gauge how much revenue we could raise from that source.We have been advised that it may take some time before we can see a clear picture emerging on revenue trends. That revenue is based on clicks-through from the ads, so having appropriate ads served will help – although we have no control over that.The early outcomes of the experiment are not very encouraging. We are earning only £5 per day from the ads. This is far less than the projections, especially given the fact they were based on a conservative estimate of our readership. You will also notice that we have an Amazon ad on the site too, which only works if people buy stuff from Amazon after arriving there from our banner. Thanks to some loyal support, we have accumulated about £20 from that source We are aware of the reservations that many of you have about advertising in general, and the choice of advertisers in particular. At this time there appears to be little choice for us, although we hope to develop an ethical policy going forward. To summarise, advertising is as crucial as donations and contributions to our expansion. Looking forward, it will only work for us if the ads are targeted well.Ultimately that works optimally if we have a site sponsor who actually targets us, and sees a direct benefit to his or her business which attaches to a relationship with SFM.We are working hard to find such sponsor(s).We will of course encourage and welcome any of your suggestions on the sponsorship front, or advice on more lucrative advertising routes.

SFM

SFM is an online community drawn from fans of all Scottish Football clubs. Its overriding goal is to see sporting integrity restored to paramountcy in Scottish Football. To help achieve that SFM will ask the questions that the mainstream media consistently fail to ask of the authorities, who in turn consistently fail to govern the sport in accordance with their own rules.